One area in which the Moto G9 Power’s camera is notably inferior to the Moto G8 Power’s is with video capture. Thanks to the use of the Snapdragon 662, it can only manage 1080p/30fps video capture, whereas its predecessor could hit 4K/30fps and 1080p/60fps. Software – Typically clean Android experience from Motorola Motorola has mercifully ditched the glossy fingerprint-magnet design of the Moto G8 Power. Indeed, the Moto G9 Power might be even less concerned with turning heads than its predecessor.

Supplemental sensors are often terrible in cheap phones, but last year’s effort did a decent job in providing a flexible budget shooting experience. What’s more, Motorola has fitted the G9 Power out with a way less useful 2MP Macro Vision camera instead.

One of the best phones on a budget

For the stat nerds out there, the Moto G9 Play’s bonus cameras use f/2.4 OmniVision OV02B sensors. And the main one is a 48MP f/1.7 Samsung GM1, used in a great many cheap phones including the Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 and TCL 10L. The Moto G9 Power is even more of a specialist tool than previous models in the range, for better and for worse. Motorola adds some shortcut gestures, but Peek is perhaps its most useful addition. This is a display that pops up when the Moto G9 Play is sitting idle, say on a table, and you ‘bump’ it to set off the motion sensors. That’s not massively fast, but do remember the sheer size of that battery. There’s a lot more battery to fill here, so the G9 Power’s recharging numbers look pretty good in context. In design terms, Motorola has mixed up the formula again, most notably when it comes to the rear camera placement. Now situated in a neat square in the top-centre portion of the phone, the three cameras and LED flash module are spaced evenly apart in a 2×2 grid, with a sensibly-placed circular fingerprint reader – with the Motorola “M” logo etched onto it – sitting just underneath.

In the Geekbench 5 single and multi-core CPU tests, the Moto G9 Power gains a small lead on its predecessor, the Moto G8 Power and outperforms the Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 in multi-core processing, as well as the more expensive Galaxy M31. It isn’t quite as good as the Realme 6 in these tests, but the differences between the two won’t really be noticeable for the vast majority of Android users.

In This Article

In most situations it makes ample use of HDR to lift the shadows while retaining highlight detail. And while a lot of our photos have a slight purple/red skew, the Moto G9 Play’s color is reasonably lifelike when shooting in daylight. It comes as no surprise, then, that performance is practically identical between the two models. Running the Geekbench 5 single- and multi-core CPU tests, the Moto G9 Play achieved the same score as the Moto G8, as well as the other Snapdragon 665 phone on the list, the Nokia 5.3. The only phone it managed to pull away from was the Samsung Galaxy A21s and its Exynos 850 chipset. The Moto G9 Play has a 5,000mAh battery that outlasts plenty of top-end phones with similar capacity according to our testing. On lighter days we are left with over 40% charge by bedtime. We have never needed to give the phone a top-up to make sure it lasts the day.